Various methods and devices that involve character recognition on a touch display, or other input device, are disclosed. Some of these may facilitate the recognition of characters that are input by people with physical impairments such as those with limited eyesight. A disclosed free-hand character recognition device comprises: an input device having stroke detection circuitry to accept input data from a user; a character recognition engine instantiated using a processing system and a data store; and a network connection to a server. The device additionally comprises a memory storing instructions to: conduct an unobtrusive user recognition procedure to obtain a user identifier from the user; download a cipher from the server to the data store using the network connection and the user identifier; and generate a prediction vector using the character recognition engine, the input data, and the cipher.